


Celestial Navigation

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Emotions, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-23 07:31:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9646457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: Set between 401 and 402.  Ten times Marcus and Abby make love in Polis before she goes back to Arkadia.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [convenientmisfires](https://archiveofourown.org/users/convenientmisfires/gifts), [victorias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/victorias/gifts).



> " . . .But I am constant as the northern star,  
>  Of whose true-fixed and resting quality  
>  There is no fellow in the firmament.  
>  The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks.  
>  They are all fire and every one doth shine,  
>  But there’s but one in all doth hold his place."  
>    
>    
>  \--William Shakespeare, _Julius Caesar_

****

 

**one.**

They stand there together for a long time, watching, as the pair of shapes shrink and blur with distance.  The Rover is waiting half a mile out of town, through the Polis town square, over the fields and down into a clearing at the base of a hill.  They watch until the sun sets around them, until the smaller shape that is Clarke disappears completely below the ridge of the hill and the larger shape that is Bellamy finally follows her.

Octavia is long gone, and they’re alone.  Night falls on Polis.  They make their way back through the dark streets to the Skaikru embassy – a low-slung outbuilding south of the tower that once housed Nightbloods; but there are no more Nightbloods now, so the beds are empty.  The lift will be fixed in the morning, says the servant who shows them to their rooms, so they can move into the tower then – Kane into a formal guest suite (no one sleeps in the old Skaikru ambassador quarters anymore; no one will ever sleep again in the bed where Lexa died), and Abby four floors down, in the healers’ quarters with Jackson.

But for now, the thirteenth clan needs an embassy and the ambassador needs a bed, so here they are.

It’s one long narrow space divided into uneven thirds: a public reception room at the front, leading to a room full of bunks for Abby, Jackson, Octavia, and the small handful of Skaikru guards that remained with Kane, and then a private room at the back where Roan’s servant says the Chancellor will sleep.

Kane looks at Abby.  Abby looks back at him.

They haven’t had a moment alone since they woke from the City of Light, not really.  Stolen scraps and fragments of time in rooms surrounded by people, never long enough to say any of the things they need to say.

She wants to tell him the thing he wouldn’t let her tell him before, about the scar on her heart shaped exactly like the ones on his wrists, the wound that opened up inside her the moment she realized what she'd done.

He wants to tell her the thing he wouldn't let himself tell her before, that day outside the prison cell when she stroked his hair and ripped his heart open all at once, the moment he realized what “I can’t do this again” really meant.

There are other things to discuss too – there’s Roan and the Grounder council, there’s shared worry over Octavia, there’s the puzzling question of why Thelonious decided so abruptly to return to Arkadia with Clarke.  Marcus is the Chancellor, Abby is his most trusted confidante, and the world is ending.  There are so many things to say.

It’s perfectly reasonable, Abby tells herself – firmly ignoring the pounding of her heart as she lies awake in her narrow bed, listening to Jackson and four guards snoring – to go knock on his door.  She hears him moving on the other side of the wall, he's awake still, it isn’t late.

They’ve come to each other’s quarters before; it happened all the time in Arkadia.  On the way back from the mess hall, "I brought you a coffee," or to drop off stacks of files before turning in for the night.  Things colleagues do.

Perfectly reasonable.

 _This is just like that_.   _You’ve done this before.  It’s exactly the same._

But it isn’t, of course.  Not this time.

If all she wanted to discuss was Thelonious, she wouldn’t be crawling out of her skin with impatience for Jackson to fall asleep. 

If all she wanted was to talk to the Chancellor, she would just get out of bed and knock on his door.

But she doesn’t want the Chancellor, she wants _Marcus_ , and if Jackson asks her she’ll tell him the truth, and no one is ready for that yet.

So she waits.

Jackson takes _forever_ to fall asleep, it feels like hours, she hates herself for how irritable she is, but by the time she finally hears his breath level off into slumber, she’s tingling so fiercely with anticipation and panic she feels carbonated.  Or maybe electrified. Tiny little shocks pulsing through her over and over as she takes a breath, counts to five, swallows hard, then rises from her bed to go knock on the Chancellor’s door.

She has an opening prepared, just in case.  “I wanted to check on your wrists,” something like that, something that might give her the opening she needs into the apology she needs to make, and perhaps – depending on how he receives it – navigate her towards saying the other thing.

The door swings open.

“I wanted to – “she begins, but there’s no time.

“Oh, thank God,” Marcus exhales gratefully, and then she’s in his arms, and he’s kissing her.

The moment the door closes behind them, the idea of doing anything other than tearing off her clothes and falling into bed with Marcus Kane is impossible, so she doesn’t even fight it.  They’re hushed and clumsy and uncertain, hands fumbling everywhere, earnest and giddy as teenagers.  Marcus struggles for several minutes with the logistics of how to remove his shirt and kiss her at the same time, annoyed at the very universe when it turns out not to be possible.  Abby trips and falls into his arms attempting to kick her boots off without pulling away to actually unlace them.  It’s ridiculous, a farce come to life, and by the time they fall onto the bed their bodies are crackling with frustration that all of this is taking _too goddamn long._

But once they arrive, things slow down, the world swings back into focus, and suddenly _Abby Griffin is in bed with Marcus Kane_ , the most improbable thing in all the world is happening right now, this minute, and suddenly everything is warm skin on skin and soft breath, and the sheer world-shattering astonishment of all of this begins to make its way through.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” he whispers to her, cradling her jaw in his big hands, kissing her mouth over and over again.  “I can’t believe this happened to us.”

“I had no idea,” she murmurs, trembling a little as his hands begin shyly, hesitantly, to trace the bare skin of her body, fingertips tripping lightly over her collarbone and the planes of her shoulders.  And she’s telling the truth, she really didn’t, because she’s known him for thirty years and it was never like this between them.  She would never have believed, if someone had told her years ago, that someday she would find herself here, on Earth, gazing up at the stars with Marcus Kane’s mouth between her breasts.  

 _Marcus Kane,_ of all people.  

Marcus, who held everyone at arm’s length.  Who smiled so rarely.  Whose heart was good, but so difficult to see.  Silent and cold and impenetrable, striding the Ark’s hallways like he was made of steel.  He’d hardened as he grew older, but the core of it had always been there.

But here they are, they crashed from the stars to earth, and he has a _beard_ now, he has a royal insignia burned into his arm and he speaks another language and he finally got the Chancellor pin he’d yearned for as long as she’s known him.  The pin she’d once been willing to risk arrest to keep him from getting, but this time she’d handed it to him freely.

He’s simultaneously unrecognizable as his old self, and the same Marcus Kane she’s known since she was twelve years old, and she never saw any of this coming.

He shifts on top of her, murmuring kisses into her skin, and her heart stops beating for a moment as his hips sink into hers and they cross a line they can never come back from as _Marcus Kane’s cock_ sweeps over her thigh and settles heavily against her skin.

In all these years she’s never even seen him without his shirt on, and yet here he is, all hot muscle and thick soft hair and skin that tastes of salt, and the proof of how badly he wants her is pressing into her belly and suddenly she feels dizzy all over.  He’s so _naked_ when he’s naked, she thinks in wonderment as he nuzzles happily into her neck.  He’s worn armor all his life, but he takes it off when he’s alone with her, and the implicit trust in that takes her breath away.

He was never like this with Callie (because of course she talked about him with Callie), and before Callie there was no one else that mattered.  Casual trysts with no heart in them, and very few even of those.  Callie tried, she wanted so badly to be the one who got through, but he was a hallway full of locked doors she couldn’t open.  Nobody could.

But every door is open to Abby, he’s letting her see straight down to the very core of him, and suddenly she can’t stop the tears from coming.

He feels her tense up a little and lifts his head to look down at her, concern in his warm brown eyes.  “You’re crying,” he says, and she knows he’s walking backwards through the past ten minutes, trying to figure out how he ruined this so quickly.  She shakes her head a little – _no, it’s all right_ – but he doesn’t take his eyes off her.

He shifts his weight, the hard warm cock pressing into her thigh, and slides his arms beneath her back, wrapping her up close and holding her against his chest.  And even though she can feel him pulsing against her, even though she knows he’s frantic with desire, still, all he does is hold her and let her cry.

She can’t say it out loud, she doesn’t have the words for it, for the way the sweet weight of a man’s body on hers feels like coming home to a place she thought she’d never see again.  She didn’t know until this moment how convinced she had been that this part of her died with Jake.

Marcus has brought her back to life, and he doesn’t even know it.

He kisses her hair, still worried and a little confused, grateful she’s letting him hold her, making no move to run, but unsure what to do next.  She cries into the corded muscles of the hollow between his shoulder and throat, lips pressed up against his collarbone, and stays there until she feels the wave of emotion begin to settle inside her.

She’ll tell him later, with the right words, when she finds them.

She can tell him a different way tonight.

She lifts one thigh to slide up and wrap around his own, pulling him tight against her, bare skin to bare skin, his heat against hers, and he looks down at her with searching eyes.   _Are you sure?  Are you sure you’re sure?_

She’s sure.

She’s been sure since the first time he kissed her.

Now she needs him to know.

 _I’m sure,_ says her other thigh as it lifts to pull him close, and _I’m sure,_ say the warm hands that glide up and down the ridges of his spine, and _I’m sure,_ says the mouth nibbling kisses into his shoulder, and finally his weight shifts on hers like they’re finally getting somewhere.

“Abby,” he murmurs hesitantly, stroking her hair, unable to stop himself from checking one last time, “if it’s too much for you – “

“Well, _someone’s_ pleased with himself,” she quips, unable to restrain herself from indulging a decades-long habit of needling him at any provocation.  He goes still and blank for a moment, and she has just enough time to hate herself, _goddammit Abby, this isn’t the time,_ before he collapses against her, shoulders trembling with the futile effort to muffle his throaty chuckles against her skin.  

_Oh, thank God._

It was the right thing to say, it clicks everything back into place between them again, they’re Abby Griffin and Marcus Kane, and the thing they’re about to do with each other doesn’t change any of that.

“I didn’t mean _that,”_ he retorts. “I wasn’t . . . boasting.”

“Oh, really.”

“Yes, really.”

She smiles up at him, eyes glowing with affection.  “It won’t be too much for me,” she tells him.  “However you meant it.  I’m ready.  I want all of you.”

“Abby,” he whispers, shifting into position, holding himself above her.  “Oh God, Abby.  I want – “

“Please, Marcus,” she says softly, reaching up to caress his cheek, savoring the bristle of beard against her fingertips.  “Please.”

He inhales deeply – like he’s collecting himself, like he’s nervous – and then finds the angle, nudges at her just a bit until she gasps, and then with one push, he’s there.

 _“Oh,”_ he exclaims, startled, and then neither of them can say anything for a very long time.

Marcus Kane makes love like he does everything else – impossibly attuned to her, gentle and sensitive and brimming with tenderness, but with an astonishingly powerful force held at bay just beneath the surface.  His fingertips trace patterns on her skin, delicate and soft, making her shiver, but his cock pushes in and slides home with one long, smooth, confident thrust and he seems to understand without making her say it out loud that she doesn’t need him gentle.  He fills her, swells inside her, pressing her open, and she has to bite back the onrush of tears again because she thought this part of her life was over and he’s taking her back to the beginning.

It’s _astonishing,_ to be wanted this badly.  The force of it takes her breath away.  No one in all her life has ever looked at her the way Marcus Kane looks at her as he cups her jaw in his hands, breath coming in ragged gasps.  He’s staring at her with naked abject wonder, like he can’t believe she’s real, like this has never happened to him before, like he’s afraid if he looks away for a moment she’ll disappear.

She never thought she would feel this again, after Jake.  

And Marcus is different, she knew he would be, everything feels different, everything feels new, but the rush of ecstasy that crashes over her like a tidal wave is exactly the same, and she’s so grateful to realize she hasn’t lost it.  

A year alone in those suddenly too-still quarters, built for three, too empty for one.  She took to sleeping in her office sometimes, just to get away from it, the noise and bustle of the Med Bay night shift more soothing than Clarke’s silent empty bunk could ever be.  She tried sometimes, when waves of loneliness rose up to choke her from Jake’s cold half of the bed, to do it herself.  Not for pleasure, just to help her sleep.  To do the things with her hands that he used to do.  But it was like a broken lightswitch.  Numb, unresponsive.  So she gave up, accepted it.  That part of her life was over.  That part of her had died with her husband, it was floating out there somewhere in space, and she hated herself a little for how deeply that hurt.  Such a small piece of what she’d lost, she told herself harshly, on those nights when she bit her lip to keep from crying, fingers moving uselessly against soft skin, desperately willing something to happen but knowing it never would.  Such a selfish thing to let herself long for.

But Marcus is warm and urgent inside her, he makes life stir and blossom in places she thought were dead, and she comes so hard she startles herself, a heavy shudder rising up from the tips of her toes to sweep over her.  she buries her face in his chest to muffle her heavy, gasping cries, faint with some dizzying combination of pleasure and gratitude and affection and relief, tears stinging her eyes, and it feels like resurrection.

He slows down, holds her there until she’s finished, then lays her back against the pillows and looks back with a question in his eyes.

“Please,” she whispers, imploring, “oh, please.”  And so he gives her what she wants, resting his forehead against hers and letting himself go, hips moving against hers harder, faster, harder, faster, until with a muffled exclamation of astonishment he bursts inside her and shudders to a halt, sweaty and dazed and happy like she’s never seen before.

“Thank you,” he whispers, which breaks her heart a little, as he pulls out of her and shifts his weight to pull her into his arms and sink down into the pillows.

She kisses his mouth.  “Thank you,” she whispers back.

She didn’t say any of the things she came here to say, but there’s always tomorrow.

* * *

  **two.**

Two hours past midnight.

Her clothes are scattered all over, boots kicked off by the door.  Maybe she’ll just carry them.  It will be quicker and quieter that way.

She slides to the edge of the bed, carefully disentangling herself from arms and legs and pillows and blankets, but her movements wake him.

“Stay,” he says sleepily, reaching up for her wrist, and she turns back to look at him.

“What?”

“Stay the night.”

“I have a bed downstairs in the healers’ quarters,” she says, hesitating.  “So Roan can find me if he needs me.”

“Abby,” he says gently, the hint of a smile on his lips.  “I think everyone figured this out a long time ago except you and me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If Roan comes looking for you in the healers’ quarters and can’t find you,” Kane says reasonably, “this is the next place he’ll look.”

“Do you think everyone knows we slept together last night?”

“No,” he says, “but I don’t think any of them will be surprised.”

“Really.”

“Octavia assumed we were already,” he says dryly.  “Indra did too.”

“I am not taking relationship advice from Octavia and Indra,” she says firmly, then raises her eyebrow as a curious, thoughtful expression washes briefly over Kane’s face.  “What?”

 _“’Relationship,’”_ he says, like he’s trying the word out, turning it over and over in his hand like an astonishing new thing he’s just discovered, and it breaks her heart a little.

“Yeah,” she says, holding back the implicit _“you beautiful idiot”_ she badly wants to tag onto the end.  “What did you think?”

“I didn’t know,” he says in a low voice, pulsing with frankness and honesty, the voice he uses when he’s about to tell her something real.  “I’ve never done this before.  We slept together in the embassy last night, and then when I woke up you were gone.  I didn’t know you would come back tonight until you actually did it.”

She looks at him for a long time.  “It changes things,” she cautions him gently, “if I spend the night.”

“I know.”

“Sex is one thing.  Sleeping together is different.”

“I know.”

“And if there’s a part of you that isn’t ready, if there’s a part of you that wants to go slow until we know what we’re doing here . . . until we’re on more steady ground – “

“Abby, the world might end in six months,” he says to her, like _she’s_ the idiot.  “I don’t have any more days to waste not waking up next to you.”

She looks at him.

He looks at her.

She climbs back into bed.

“I think you’ve made a very wise decision,” he murmurs into her hair as he rolls back on top of her and settles the warm, sweet weight of his body against hers.

She chuckles. “You made it pretty difficult to resist,” she admits.  “That was a _very_ good line.”

“I promise I’ll make it worth your while,” he says, smiling down at her, and a heartbeat later there he is again, deep inside her, and she can’t remember exactly why it is that she wanted to walk back down a cold dark hallway to a cold dark stairwell to that cramped, narrow cot in the cold dark healers’ quarters next to Jackson, when she could be right here with Marcus Kane inside her.

She cradles his body in the hollow of her thighs, arms wrapped around his back, listening to the shivery-soft sounds of his gasping sighs, thinking about the way he looked at her and said _“relationship”_ like it was some kind of rare jewel he was holding in his hand, and suddenly the idea of wasting any more days not waking up next to Marcus Kane feels like insanity.

He comes inside her, shaking with pleasure, head sinking down against her shoulder as he catches his breath, but she’s only a heartbeat behind him and tumbles over the edge of the cliff to meet him there, whispering his name as tremors rack through her.

They fall asleep just like that.

* * *

 **three** **.**

Light streams in through the curtains, heavy and warm.  Even the sun seemed duller, grayer, under ALIE, like the sky itself was trying to tell them all something was wrong. 

But it’s radiant now, rose-gold and beautiful, and she’s so content she’s forgotten she isn’t supposed to be.  Outside this room the world is still moving forward in a straight line towards the oncoming storm.  They’ll have to go be Doctor and Chancellor soon.

But not right now.

Now his beard brushes over the soft skin of her breasts and belly, stirring her into wakefulness and making her squirm happily.  He’s kissing his way down her body, making his way towards something they haven’t done yet, and anticipation sizzles low in her gut as her hands lift to tangle in his soft hair, guiding him.

He kisses the inside of her thighs, licking at the silken skin, tasting last night.  She shivers.

He rests his head for a moment on the swell of her pelvic bone and breathes her in, inhaling deeply.  It makes her smile.  Horses do that, she knows this from Octavia, this warm whuffling inhale when they meet someone new.  Octavia says learning your scent is the way to get a horse to trust you, to feel easy when you’re near.  It’s just Marcus, getting used to her.

He nudges her thighs open a little farther with his nose, and she obliges obediently, trembling with pleasure as he rakes light fingertips up and down her legs.  Goosebumps all over.  He likes that, smiles against her skin, does it again.

“You’re sure taking your time about it,” she mutters crossly, and hears the sound of a distant chuckle muffled by white fur.

“I’m trying to make a good first impression,” he retorts.  “This is a lot of pressure.”

“Am I that demanding?”

“I’m nervous.”  But he’s more amused at himself than embarrassed.  “I don’t know yet how you like it.”

This makes her laugh.  “Why do you think I’ve got my hands in your hair?” she says dryly.  “I’ll let you know how you’re doing.”

“Do I get to pull your hair too?”

“Later.”

“All right, then,” he says agreeably.  “Put me to work.”

She leans back against the pillows, still laughing, and tangles her fingers into his hair, adding a little bit more pressure, and guides him down to where she wants him.

He’s a good student, understands immediately, and when he takes the soft rosy outer folds between his lips to suck at them slightly, her whole back arches off the mattress with pleasure.

No one has done this in such a long time.

“Yes,” she whispers to him, and she feels him smile.  So he keeps going, caressing her labia with lips and tongue for what feels like an eternity before sliding his hands flat up the inside of her thighs to gently pull them apart and move in deeper.

She guides him lower, first, towards her entrance, chasing the wetness he’s creating faster that he can lick it up.  He’s reverent there, like he’s returning to a sacred place, and the strokes of his tongue are perfect without any guidance needed – light when she wants light, hard when she wants hard.  

Three nights in and he already knows his way around.

He waits for her to tug at him, moving him back up so he can wrap his lips around her clit, and here he’s hesitant for the first time.  Either he’s never done this before, or he’s never done it with someone where he’s cared so badly about getting it right.

“A little rough is okay,” she whispers, stroking his hair.  “I like it like that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she murmurs, memories of past pleasure washing over her, and laughs a little.  “I remember, Jake used to – “

Silence.

The world stops moving for a long, long time.

Eventually his head emerges from the furs, and she wants to laugh at him – hair mussed, mouth sticky, half-covered in blankets – but there’s something in his eyes that makes her tear up instead.

“I’m sorry,” she says helplessly, but she isn’t quite sure why.

Marcus isn’t either.  “Abby,” he says in a gentle voice, “did you think I was upset that you said his name?”

And this is it, this right here, the reason why she loves him.  It’s not the way it feels when he comes inside her or the way his mouth on her neck makes her shiver.  It’s the things he sees without ever having to be told.

“I didn’t know,” she whispers.  “I wasn’t sure if it was okay.  I didn’t want you to be – “

“I’m not,” he says simply.  “Not now, not ever.  He was your _husband_ , Abby. I would never ask you to keep that part of your life separate from me.  Anything about Jake that you want to tell me, I want to hear.  Anything about Jake you need to keep inside your heart, just for yourself, I won’t ever pry.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” she says, a little helplessly.

“We’ll figure this out as we go,” he tells her, reaching up to thread his fingers through hers.

“There hasn’t been anyone else since I was eighteen.  I don’t remember any of the rules.”

He laughs at this, actually laughs, like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.  He laughs until there are tears rolling down his face, shoulders shaking beneath the white fur blankets.

“Abby,” he says, in affectionate exasperation, “when have you _ever followed the rules_?”

Which is so infuriatingly, impossibly, hilariously _true_ that she can’t resist either, and soon she’s laughing too.

He kisses his way back down her stomach, back to where he was before.  “All right,” he says.  “Say what you were going to say.  Jake used to . . .”

She blushes, but she tells him, and he does it, and her gasp of pleasure is so sharp and keening it’s nearly a scream.  (Hopefully the Floukru ambassador next door has already left for the day.)

Dipping his tongue just under the hood of her clit, that’s how Jake used to do it, the spot he discovered almost by accident that made her come so hard she saw stars.

Marcus is delighted.  He likes this about Abby, that she lived for so long in daily company with another body, that she isn’t afraid to ask for what she wants, that she knows who she is in bed. He likes the part of her that was Jake Griffin’s lover for more than twenty years.  He was telling her the truth.  He isn’t jealous, not in the least.  When he thinks about Jake, he’s grateful.

She had lived so close to Jake for so long that her body was deeply and truly known to him.  Intimate, familiar.  Jake had a map to Abby, every inch of her in precise detail, and after twenty years he must have known exactly where he was going every time.

Marcus doesn’t have a map yet.  Marcus is still exploring new terrain, finding his way.  But Abby doesn’t mind.  Abby will show him the landmarks, she will teach it to him like a language, and he will build a map of his own, and whether it’s different from Jake Griffin’s or the same won’t matter.

It’s like celestial navigation.

All he needs is Abby, constant as the Northern Star, and she’ll guide him all the way home.

* * *

  **four.**

All she wants is a goddamn bath.

It’s pouring rain, but Echo insisted on sparring Roan outside today anyway.  He has no control over the weather during _solo gonplei_ , after all, and if he isn’t steady enough to keep his footing in the mud –

“I’m dead,” he says wearily to Echo.  “Thanks.  I get it.”

But of course if the king is sparring in the rain, then Abby has to _watch_ in the rain, and Echo keeps him at it for an hour and a half.

By the time they return to the healers’ chambers so she can peel wet bandages off the king’s chest, she’s muddy and shivering and irritable, only _just_ able to refrain from snapping at him.  She doesn’t even bother attempting to refrain from snapping at Echo, but Echo doesn’t really give a damn. 

Absently, without looking up from her work, she calls over one of the servants – a young girl who works for the Commanders’ healers and has been assigned to Abby and Jackson – and asks the girl if she can draw her a bath in the Skaikru ambassador’s quarters.

The girl nods and scurries off, unfazed by it, but Abby is too distracted to realize what she’s just said, or aware of the way it’s received as new information by everyone else in the room. Jackson’s hands pause ever so slightly in the midst of his work before quietly resuming again, tense and a little uncomfortable.  Echo looks sharply from the doctor to her assistant and back again, attuned with the razor-sharp observational skills of a spy to the fact that Abby’s second did not know until this moment that the ambassador was her lover.  (She watches Abby and Marcus keenly after this, trying to discern whether this is a dangerous secret or merely an ordinary one.)  Even Roan raises an eyebrow, too tactful to say anything aloud but redrawing his mental sketch of both Abby and Marcus to account for this crucial new piece of intelligence.

But Abby doesn’t notice any of it.  Her clothes are sticking to her skin, her hair is a tangled mess, her boots are squishing, and all she wants is to finish examining the king so she can be dismissed back upstairs.

By the time she arrives at Kane’s room she is bone-weary, wet clothes beginning to stiffen with grime, and only the thought of a long hot soak in that fragrant, hot bath soothes her jangled nerves.

She lets herself in without knocking, kicking off her wet boots by the door, and squish-squashes her way in wet socks to the bathing chamber.

“Hi!” says Marcus brightly, submerged up to his chin in her bath.

She stares at him.

“What are you doing?” she asks tightly.

“Taking a bath.  I came back from my meeting with the Floukru and Trikru ambassadors and it was just here, waiting.”

“Yeah,” she says.  “It was for me.”

“Oh.”

“I requested it.”

“You’re soaking wet,” he says, noticing her for the first time.  “What happened?”

“Roan was sparring outside.”

“But it’s pouring rain.”

“I noticed that, yes.”

“I’ll get out,” he offers, sensing that she’s irritated, not sure what to do. 

“It’s fine.”

“I didn’t know it was yours.”

“It’s fine, Marcus.  Stay where you are.”

“You’re mad at me,” he says, but it isn’t accusatory, just observing.  He’s being careful, trying to navigate this.

“I’m not mad, I’m just wet and tired and I’ve had a long day.”  There’s a bucket of hot water next to the copper drain in the floor, and she decides she too exhausted for a fight right now.  “I’m going to use the bucket, if that’s okay.”

“Abby, take the bathtub.  It’s fine.  It was supposed to be for you.  I didn’t know, it was just here when I got back.”

“I just need to wash up and I’ll be fine,” she says, pulling off her wet socks and tugging her sweater off over her head.  “I can take a bath when you’re done.”

“The water won’t be as hot then.”

“Marcus, stop apologizing, enjoy your bath, I can’t do this right now,” she says wearily, and she can feel him watching her in puzzlement but he doesn’t say anything else.

She strips off her sodden wet clothes in the perfunctory, businesslike manner of a doctor accustomed to changing into and out of scrubs in rooms full of people, and hangs them up on the hooks in the corner to dry.  There’s a sponge in the bucket, and she begins the wearisome process of scrubbing the mud and sweat off her body, watching the grimy water sluice down the drain.

“Is this our first fight?” Marcus suddenly asks, in the voice he uses when he’s gathering information, and she turns to him in astonishment.

“Our _first fight_?” she repeats incredulously, annoyance flaring up high again as she drops the sponge into the bucket with a heavy splash and begins ticking items off her fingers.  “Well, for one, there was the time you tried to _float_ me, and then there was when you arrested me for working with Raven.”

“Abby – “

“Oh, kicking me off the Council.  The shocklashing, that’s a good one.  Yelling at me about what to do with Emerson, being mad that I authorized the move to Mount Weather . . . “

“I didn’t mean our first fight _ever_ ,” he says patiently, “I meant our first fight this week.  Now that things are different.  Now that we’re . . . “

“In a relationship.”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, it is,” she says, and picks the sponge back up to continue rinsing the dirt off her body.  Marcus stands up from the bathtub as though moving to get out, and she’s instantly irritated, _how many times do I have to say stay where you are and finish?,_ but she stops short with the words unspoken when she gets her first look at his body.

 “Oh, for the love of God,” she snaps in exasperation, looking from the sponge she’s been running all over her naked body to the flushed, erect cock between his thighs.  “This is turning you on, isn’t it?”  He shrugs a little sheepishly, conceding the point.  “Marcus, there are _sticks_ in my hair.  I have mud caked halfway up my legs.”

“I’m sorry,” he says helplessly.  She sighs with furious annoyance, but there’s fondness and amusement beginning to creep in around the edges.

“You are _impossible,”_ she tells him sternly, picking the sponge back up again, but this time when she wrings the hot water out over her skin she doesn’t look away.  He sits back down, grips the edge of the tub, swallows hard.  She runs the sponge over her chest and arms, hot water dripping and steaming along her skin, droplets trickling down over her nipples and down the slope of her stomach to the soft brown hair between her thighs.

“Abby,” he murmurs.  She wrings the sponge out over her tangled hair, closing her eyes, letting the hot water run down her face.  “Oh, Jesus.  Abby.”  But she still doesn’t speak.  He watches her wash herself completely clean, skin pink and steaming, before he finally says, in a low voice, “You know, it’s really a shame to waste all this hot water on only one person.”

She looks over at him, arches an eyebrow.  He smiles.

She doesn’t smile back, just rolls her eyes again, but she steps over the edge of the tub and sinks down into the water.

“Let me get your back,” he murmurs as she settles herself between his thighs, and she nods wordlessly as he gently lifts her damp hair and sponges off her back, leaning in close to breathe in the clean scent of her pink skin.  And then it’s his turn, she runs the sponge all over his back and chest, the hot water soothing and arousing at once.  The heavy floral scent of the bath oils is intoxicating, and she relaxes against him, all the day’s tension flowing out of her body.

“I’ve never lived with anyone,” he says unexpectedly, and she turns to stare at him.  This thought has never occurred to her.  “All these things you learned with Jake, about how you _share space_ with someone, I never learned those things.”

“You’re doing really good for less than a week in,” she assures him, kissing his mouth with amused fondness.  He smiles back, pleased.

“I’ll get better,” he promises her, pulling her onto his lap, and she laughs, settling her warm wet arms around his neck.

“I know,” she says, as her body sinks down against his.  “I know you will.”

When his cock nudges its way inside her, she sighs with perfect contentment.  Why waste time being annoyed about something as trivial as a bath when anytime she wants she can open her thighs and take Marcus Kane inside her like this and feel the force of their desire for each other echo all the way down to their bones?  It’s a revelation every time, how good he feels.  Not just because she’s missed having a man inside her for so long, but because that man is Marcus.

He leans back against the edge of the copper tub, letting her ride him, letting her take control, as she leans forward to trail wet fingertips down his chest and press kisses against his throat.  He comes so hard they can see it in the water as he pulls out of her, feathery tendrils of white floating beneath the surface, then finishes her with his hand, rubbing circles around her clit until she shudders in his arms.

They stay there, arms entangled, until the water begins to grow cold around them, too sated and content to move.

“I’m sorry I stole your bath,” he murmurs, kissing her shoulder, and she laughs.

“You were right,” she tells him.  "It’s better with two.”

* * *

**five.**

The next day brings their first real crisis – an order from Roan for Kane and three other ambassadors to pay an overnight visit to the village council of Trishanakru, whose ambassador is being difficult.  He’ll be gone until morning, and they aren’t sure they can survive twenty-four full hours without tearing each other’s clothes off at least once.

So they improvise.

Jackson leaves for an hour to go eat lunch and take a quick nap in his quarters at around the same time every day.  There’s a storage closet adjacent to the healer’s chambers, and there’s fifteen minutes between the time Jackson will leave for lunch and the time Octavia will come looking for Marcus.  Not ideal, but there’s no other option.

It’s dark in the storage closet, and cramped, too.  No room to sit or lay down, no room to take off clothes.  So it’s silent and fast and up against the wall.

She turns around, which startles him and makes him swallow hard, bracing her palms against the wall and facing her back to him.  They’ve never done it at this angle.  They’re both ready, just a few quick zips and tugs and he pushes hard into her from behind, groaning into the back of her neck.

They’re too tangled in fabric for much flexibility, but oh Jesus, it feels good.  If Marcus has one fault as a lover – and it’s a small one, really – it’s a tendency to be overly reverent with her.  But it evaporates there in the closet, when it’s hot and close and rushed and hard, when he pushes in at this new and strange angle, feeling her thighs press tight against him, and suddenly it’s something different, suddenly it’s fucking, and Abby feels pure unfiltered pleasure rocket through her as Marcus seizes her in his arms and takes control. 

It’s _perfect,_ the exact right amount of rough to leave her shaky and gasping, without ever letting her forget for a moment that she’s the thing he cherishes most in all the world.  He thrusts into her, fingers pressing so tightly into her hips she can feel the marks they’ll leave when he’s gone, beard rough against the hollow of her neck, and it’s so new and astonishing that they both come with extraordinary speed – Abby first, bracing her palms hard against the wall to keep her balance, then Kane, grunting hard into her and collapsing against her back.

They stand there together for a long moment, breathing it in, letting the shockwaves die down.  Abby can feel without even looking at him that Kane’s never done it like this before.  He kisses her neck over and over as they soften together, making the most of their remaining scraps of time.

Then, “Ready when you are, Kane,” comes Octavia’s voice from the other side of the door, and they freeze, staring at each other.

When they emerge from the closet, disheveled and sheepish, she’s standing with two travel packs and her arms folded across her chest.  She doesn’t say anything, but her raised eyebrows are eloquent enough to make the point clear as she looks from one to the other and back again.

“Piece of advice, for next time?” she says to Kane.  “Better to keep it in the bedroom and be a few minutes late than be right on time in a room that isn’t soundproof.”

Kane flushes to the roots of his hair and can’t look at her.  “How long have you been standing there?”

“Oh, I’m not the one you have to worry about,” she says, tossing him his travel pack.  “But if Jackson can’t look either of you in the eye for awhile, don’t be too surprised.”

“I’ll take care of it,” says Abby immediately, silencing the panicked apology she can see forming on Kane’s lips.  “Now go.”

He nods, turns to follow Octavia out the door.  She sighs and shoves him back inside.  “You’ll have sex in a public closet but you’re too awkward to kiss her goodbye in front of me?  Jesus, Kane, you’re _awful_ at this.”

Abby can’t quite suppress the bubble of laughter rising up in her chest, but she covers it as well as she can, kissing him warmly before shoving him out the door, then settling in with a sigh to wait for Jackson, listening to amusement as they bicker their way down the hallway. 

“ . . . I’m just saying, you _do_ have a bed.”

“Knock it off, Octavia.”

* * *

**six.**

She hasn’t done this in a long time, but twenty-odd years of muscle memory doesn’t fail her.

It’s easiest to get the angle she likes when he sits up a little, with his back against the headboard, so she can settle herself between his thighs.

He seems startled, but pleased, in a dazed kind of way, when she gently pushes him into position, but swallows hard when he realizes what she’s about to do. “Abby,” he murmurs uncertainly, with that look he gets on his face anytime she does something unexpected.  

She’s figured something important out by now about sex with Marcus. He’s a good lover to Abby because of the way he feels about _her, specifically._   He wants her with every nerve and cell of his whole body, the sheer force of which conveniently shoves his brain out of the way.  When he’s inside her, he’s so good she wants to cry; but it’s instinct, not experience.  So any time they try something new, she has to work around that damned brain of his again.  Because this part he isn’t used to.  It’s intimate in a different way, he’s open, in the light, she’s going to look at him and smell him and taste him, and he’s suddenly hesitant and shy.

But Abby isn’t worried, because she knows how this works, knows how _he_ works, like a magic trick, knows how to flip the switch to turn off his brain so he can just let himself _be_ with her without panicking that he’s doing it wrong.  She kisses his nipples, first left and then right, flicking a little with her tongue until they tighten into stiff brown peaks she can tug into her mouth and tease a little with her teeth.  He groans, and she feels him settle back against the headboard, closing his eyes.

 _There we go,_ she thinks, smiling to herself.   _Stop thinking so damn much._

She lets her lips and tongue trail lazily down the light dusting of hair on his perfect chest, licking lightly at the tang of sweat on his skin.  He says her name again, soft and slow, not because he’s about to tell her something or he’s trying to get her attention, but because he likes the way it feels in his mouth.  It’s become the sound he makes anytime she does anything he likes, a soft exhalation.  He breathes her out.   _“Abby.  Abby.”_  She gives him one last look – smiling up at him from between his thighs – before she ducks her head and sets to work.

He shudders so violently at the first touch of her lips that she has to hold him down, running soothing palms up and down his thighs to press him back against the headboard.  She starts slow, just pressing a delicate kiss against the head, letting her lips and tongue slick the sensitive skin with wetness, some of it his and some of it hers.  He groans, and his thighs pulse beneath her palms, but he holds still.

More, then.  Mouth open, taking the head inside, wrapping her lips around him for a light, gentle suck.

 _“Fuck,”_ he exclaims involuntarily, a word she’s almost never heard him use in thirty years, and a rush of exultation flows through her.  She feels invincible.  She can do anything.  She’s done something no one else has ever done – made Marcus Kane lose this much control over himself.

She wonders what else she can get him to say.

She’s slow and precise with him, but teasing too, surprising him into astonishing new sensations. She’s a doctor who was married for twenty years, and he’s a man whose deepest darkest fear was that everyone else in the world was built for this except for him and he’s lost at sea with only the stars to guide him.  She knows his body better than he does.  She teaches him his own pleasure, careful and precise, so next time he’ll remember and can name the things he wants.

Oh, but it’s so easy to make Marcus happy.  He likes everything.  He likes firm hands stroking up and down, fluttery little kitten licks against that little indentation at the top of the ridge of vein (she’ll give him the anatomy lesson with proper terminology later), messy wet kisses around the head as her tongue nudges at the unbearably sensitive slit.  He likes when she angles herself to take him all the way back into her throat, the warmth of her mouth making him shiver.  He likes delicate scratches of fingernail against the heavy, aching mounds at the base of his cock while she kisses her way up the shaft.

He likes it all so much that she has to pace herself to impossible slowness to keep him from coming too fast.  He’s sweaty and limp by the time she decides to let him finish, slumped back against the headboard, breathing her name in and out, in and out. _“Abby, Abby.”_ All traces of resistance, of hesitation, are long gone.  He clutches wildly at great fistfuls of her hair, letting it tumble through his fingertips, hands moving everywhere.  He’s nearly crested the peak three times already, and this time when she finally guides him over, he utters a cry that sounds like shock.

She’s ready for this part, with the ease born of long practice, but Marcus _tastes_ different than Jake and she’s surprised that that should surprise her.  He comes hard, but she’s braced for it, doesn’t lose a drop, and the earthy bitterness of him tastes sweet against her tongue.  Then she kisses him clean until he goes soft and malleable in her hands and mouth, sighing as he sinks down onto the pillows and pulls her down with him.

He kisses her mouth open and slips his tongue inside, running it across hers to catch the last traces of himself, and considers thoughtfully. “That’s what I taste like?” he asks her, and she nods, smiling.  “I like the way you taste better,” he says finally, as though he’s been weighing this important conundrum in his mind, and she laughs.  Not because it amuses her that he’s comparing the way they taste like it’s a matter of great importance – although he is, and it does – but because it’s such a Marcus thing to say.  

_Whatever I have, you have better.  Whatever I am, you are more._

Impossible gratitude for the tiniest things.

“You taste good to me,” she whispers, cradling his face in her hands.  “Everything about you is perfect.”

“Abby – “

“Perfect,” she says again, decisively, and kisses him to shut him up.

* * *

**seven.**

This is the way she’s always liked it best.

Her fingers clutch wildly at the intricate wrought iron lattice of the headboard, bracing herself, bearing down as hard as she can.  He surges inside her, wild, exultant, letting her ride him so fiercely that the pleasure skirts deliciously close to pain. 

Sweat trickles down through her hair, beading against the taut, clenched muscles of her back, sliding down in glittering tracks along her spine to the place where his hands, powerful and urgent, clutch at her ass to hold her down while she grips the headboard.  His feet are planted, knees bent, giving her someplace to lean back without falling, letting her press down hard enough to take every inch of him inside.

She looks down at him, at his disheveled hair and kiss-swollen lips and dazed eyes.  He’s practically faint with pleasure.  She’s never taken control like this before, been this rough with him, and it makes her shiver with delight how much he enjoys yielding to her like this. 

She lets go of the headboard, leans down, hair tumbling loose like a silk curtain across her face, and plants her hands on his shoulders, taking him deep, hard, fast, feeling him shudder with every thrust.  She told him, when she pushed him down against the pillows and straddled him with her muscular, slim thighs, that he would enjoy it this way because he wouldn’t have to do any of the work.  And she’s true to her word, she lets him lie still and just _feel_ it, the way her hips slam into his so loud the sound reverberates against the walls of their room.

She feels him begin to rise and rise, hears his breath start to crack in his chest, shattering into hot little gasps, and she knows he’s close.  She reaches back to where his hands are cupping her ass and gently removes one, placing it between her thighs, and he doesn’t need to be told twice.

“Here?” he manages to choke out through frantic gasps as his fingers find her clit, and she nods happily, closing her eyes, letting it all wash over her.  He knows what she likes by now, he’s a quick study, and she comes so hard she can’t breathe.

“Are you  . . .” she murmurs hoarsely, and he nods.

“So close,” he whispers.

“Harder?”

_“Please.”_

So her fingers curl around the wrought iron again, every muscle in her body tense as a bowstring, reminding him forcibly how much power and strength she carries in her tiny frame, and she fucks him and fucks him and fucks him until the headboard begins to rattle loose from its bolts, until his face is pink and flushed and his chest is gleaming with sweat, until he groans low and desperate from his belly and she’s filled with a burst of wetness and heat.

 _“Jesus,”_ he exclaims as she flops down beside him in exhaustion, catching her breath.  “Never done it like _that_ before.”

“No headboards on the Ark,” she reminds him mischievously.  “If you can’t break the furniture a little, what’s the point?”

He chuckles at this, rolling over until he’s on top of her and kissing her mouth again and again.  “If someone had asked me ten years ago which was more likely,” he remarks with amusement, “living on earth or breaking a headboard with Abby Griffin, I would have told them those were the two most impossible things in the world.”

“Do we have to pay Roan back for the bed?”

“Octavia smashed three wooden benches and a table sparring with him,” he sighs wearily.  “He can put it on my tab.”

“Sleeping with the Chancellor comes with some perks, I see.”

“Sleeping with Dr. Griffin is its _own_ perk,” he grins back at her, nuzzling kisses into her neck, and her hands come up almost reflexively to stroke his hair as he settles against her, softening into sleep. 

“Goodnight, Marcus,” she murmurs, soothing him with gentle fingers in his hair, cradling him as his weight sinks down against her, and it feels like a miracle.  To want someone this badly and to care for them this much, all at once.  To take him deeply inside her as hard as she can, and then to hold him against her breast and soothe him to sleep.

She had this once, before she lost it.  Marcus never has.

It _is_ a miracle, she decides.  It’s hope.  They’ve been given a chance to find something they never believed was possible.

She hasn’t called it by name yet - but she knows.

* * *

**eight.**

 Marcus sleeps, and Abby thinks about Jake.

* * * * *

_“If I die first, you should get married again,” he says to her, and she looks up abruptly from the shoulder she’s busily kissing to stare at her husband blankly._

_“What?”_

_“We’ve never talked about it,” he tells her easily, “but I wouldn’t want you to think that you couldn’t.”_

_She looks down at him seriously, running her fingers through his hair.  “Honey, we don’t have to talk about this today.”_

_“Then when?”_

_“Jake,” she tells him gently, “we_ just _said goodbye to your father.”_

_“That’s not why – “_

_“Jake.”_

_“It isn’t just about that, Abby,” he says.  “But yeah.  Okay?  Yeah.  It made me think.  It’s just, she’s, you know, they were all each other had, just the three of us, and today when I was watching her when they opened up the airlock I just looked at her and I thought, ‘She’s never gonna let anybody else love her again,’ and it was like losing him twice, you know?  Or like losing_ her. _Like the mom I knew is gone too.”_

_“Oh, honey,” she says, tears stinging her eyes, but there’s nothing she can say, so she just kisses him instead, over and over, soft and sweet and sad._

_“I want you to have a baby, Abby,” he says to her.  “You always wanted a baby.  You wouldn’t be whole without one.  If I die first, you should get married again so you can have a baby.”_

_“You’re in perfect health, you idiot,” she snaps, her discomfort at his strange tone manifesting as irritation  “And I’m a medical student, I should know.”_

_He smiles a little at this, but absently, as though he’s far away.  “I’m not saying it’ll happen,” he concedes.  “I’m just saying.  If it does.  You were always meant to be a mom.  You should get that chance.”_

_She takes a deep breath, lifts his hand from the bed and presses it against her belly.  “Well,” she says, a little nervously.  “I’ve got some good news for you, then.”_

_He sits bolt upright, staring.  She has his attention now._

_“I . . . what?  Are you saying you – we’re gonna – you mean you’re –_ what _?”_

_She kisses his mouth over and over.  “Boy or girl,” she murmurs, “we’re naming this child after your father.  Boy or girl, there’s going to be another Clarke Griffin in your life.”_

_Then she takes him in her arms and holds him against her shoulder as the impossibly complex thing inside him – joy, grief, joy, grief – finally takes over.  His tears are warm on her skin and she thinks to herself that he’s_ fucking crazy _if he thinks this kind of love is ever given to anyone twice in one lifetime._

* * * * *

_They joke about it sometimes, after that._

_“I’ve got a fourteen-hour shift in surgery,” she says, kissing him on the cheek on her way out the door.  “If I die of exhaustion, you have to marry Diana Sydney.”_

_“Fine,” he says, not looking up from his breakfast, “but if I die repairing the Section Five ventilation shaft, you have to marry Thelonious.”_

_“Gross,” says Clarke firmly, swinging her tiny feet against the chair._

_“It’ll be fun,” says Jake.  “Come on!  You always wanted a brother.”_

_“I don’t want either of you to die.”_

_“We’re not,” says Abby hastily.  “Nobody’s going anywhere.  Your dad and I are just making jokes.”_

_“Okay because I can’t marry Wells if he’s my brother and I don’t_ think _I want to marry him because I don’t think you're_ allowed _to_ _marry anybody when you’re seven but if I_ want _to someday then Mom shouldn’t marry his dad probably.”_

_“A well-reasoned argument,” says Jake.  “You’re very persuasive when you want to be.”_

_“Can I_ _have a cookie?”_

_“No.”_

* * * * *

 _He tangles his fingers with hers, resting his forehead against her, breathing hard as he feels her warm wetness pulse around him.  They’re under the covers, trying to keep quiet and avoid waking Clarke.  He brushes the ring on her finger and smiles against her mouth as he kisses her.  Such a little thing, a wedding ring, just a tiny piece of metal, but it contains a whole infinity inside it._  For as long as you both shall live.  _He drops his head to her shoulder as her hands on his sweat-sheened back grip him frantically, and they come together with the ease of long practice.  But he keeps her hand in his, stroking the ring._

_“Happy anniversary,” she murmurs into his hair._

_“Happy anniversary, baby.  I love being married to you,” he whispers into her ear, a little out of breath, and she laughs._

_“So far you’ve turned out to be pretty good at it,” she whispers back.  “I hope I don’t die first.  Shame to waste all this on Diana Sydney.”_

_“I’m considering switching to Nygel,” he says thoughtfully.  “Unlimited access to moonshine is quite a perk.”_

_“Stick with me,” she advises him, “I can get you all the good drugs.”_

_“Hmmm, that’s true.  It’s a toss-up.”  He lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses her ring, then the palm of her hand.  “Ten years,” he says._

_“And pretty good ones.”_

_“Do you remember the night my dad died?” he asks her suddenly, and she leans up on her elbow to look at him curiously._

_“Of course.”_

_“Do you ever think about it?” he whispers.  “About what I said to you.”_

_“Jake, your mom was ready to go,” she murmurs softly.  “It was her time.  She held out for a long while, she had good years with her granddaughter, but she never recovered after your dad died.  They’re together now.  It was just  . . . it was her time.”_

_“That’s what I mean,” he says.  “I don’t want us to be people who never recover.”_

_“Baby, what are you talking about?”_

_“Pact,” he says, taking her hand in his.  Their rings clink together, ever so faintly, and the sound makes her shiver for some reason she can’t name.  “If I go first, keep my ring with you.  And keep yours.”_

_“Of course I will, Jake, why would – “_

_“And then when you’re ready,” he interrupts her, “if you meet someone else, if you decide you want – “_

_“Jake, stop it.”_

_“Then you should take it off,” he tells her.  “Hold onto it as long as you need it, then let it go when you need to.”_

_She stares at him, blank, confused.  “Jake, I don’t want to talk about this,” she says uncomfortably.  “I know we joke, but I mean.  Not for real.”_

_“Baby, we_ have _to talk about it for real,” he tells her impatiently, “that’s what I’m saying.  She spent the last decade of her life holding onto a ghost.  You were there at the funeral, you heard what Vera said.  She said sometimes people lose the love of their life and it breaks something inside them that can’t be repaired.”  He kisses her mouth over and over again.  “Please don’t break,” he whispers.  “Please stay the Abby I love, even if I’m gone.”_

_“Jake –“_

_“Please don’t turn into my mother,” he murmurs, and she realizes he’s crying.  “Sitting by the window all day.  Staring out at the stars.  Eyes glazed over.  Waiting to die.  She loved me, she loved you and Clarke, but it wasn’t enough.  None of it was enough, to fix the thing that broke when my dad died.”_

_She’s silent for a long moment.  “Will it make you feel better,” she finally says, “if I promise?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Even though I think this is morbid and insane and I could not be_ less _interested in making plans for a second husband when I already have my hands full with the one I’ve got.”  It works, he cracks a little smile, softening, and she kisses his mouth with lingering sweetness.  “I can promise that I will . . . consider being open to it,” she finally says.  “Maybe.  At some distant point in the future.  Which I can hardly even imagine right now.  But sure.  If it makes you feel better.  If you’re gone, and if I ever meet someone worth taking this ring off for, I promise I’ll think about it.”_

_“That’s all I’m asking."_

_“But either way,” she whispers, kissing him over and over, “Jake, we are not your parents.  If anything happens to either of us, neither of us would give up on Clarke.  Nobody is going to lock themselves in a room and stop living for ten years, waiting for it to be our turn to die.  It was a terrible thing to witness, and we would never do that to each other, or to her.  You’re worrying about nothing.”_

_“I just want you to be happy,” he tells her._

_“I am,” she smiles, kissing his shoulder.  “I promise, baby.  I am.”_

_* * * * *_

_He doesn’t say anything to her right away, when he begins to suspect about the oxygen scrubbers._

_He needs to think first._

_He can’t go to Thelonious with this – Thelonious was an engineer, he might already know and have chosen to keep it quiet.  Jake wouldn’t put it past him.  Which means he also can’t trust Marcus Kane, not anymore.  Marcus made his choice, he chose Thelonious, he’s becoming a different man – someone Jake looks at and doesn’t recognize anymore, someone cold and hard who looks right through you.  Anything Jake tells Marcus will make its way to the Council, and he can’t risk Abby finding out that way.  She needs to hear this from him, but only after he’s sure._

_He needs someone whose integrity he trusts, someone who would put everything on the line to keep the Ark alive, someone who won’t say anything to Abby._

_And he needs to get to him without raising any suspicions._

_Fortunately, he’s always been good at poker._

_Charles is alone in the Factory Station mess hall when he finds him, and he knows Jake’s face means trouble.  Jake sets down two glasses of moonshine and a deck of cards. “If anyone asks, it’s a two-man game tonight,” he says quietly.  “No one else can hear what I’m about to tell you, Charles.  I’m gonna talk and I need you to nod and just listen.  Laugh every once in awhile, like we’re just having fun.”_

_Charles nods,_ got it, _and that’s all Jake has to say.  He only asks him one question as he shuffles the deck and deals out seven-card stud with elaborate casualness:_

_“Does Abby know?”_

_“Not yet.”_

_“Okay,” says Charles.  “I got all night.  Talk.”_

_So Jake does.  Jake tells him everything.  Charles listens, takes it in, keeps his face neutral, waves away onlookers who stroll over to join the game, stays calm, does everything Jake needed him to do._

_After Jake finishes speaking, there’s a long silence.  Nothing but the swish and flip of cards.  Jake has trip nines, though Charles can only see two of them.  The third’s in the hole with a useless two of hearts.  But Charles has the jack and the king of spades face-up, and Jake’s not a reckless man unless he has to be, so he calls instead of raising.  Charles deals him a five on the river, no help, and raises the pot just enough that Jake can’t tell if he’s bluffing or serious._

_To hell with it._

_“All in,” says Jake, pushing his chips into the middle of the table.  Charles flips over his cards._

_Ten, queen, ace._

_“Well, there you go,” says Jake agreeably, not giving a fuck about the drink tokens he just lost but thinking uncomfortable thoughts about signs and portents._ You bet big and lost big, Griffin.  What are you gonna do?

_“Don’t go gettin’ superstitious on me,” says Pike quietly.  “S’ a card game, Jake, not a goddamn omen.”_

_“Charles – “_

_“Tell Abby,” his friend advises, pocketing the drink tokens and handing Jake his cards back._

_“They might float me for this.  If I’m wrong.  If Thelonious knew already and wanted to keep it quiet.”_

_“But if they_ don’t _know,” says Charles, “then floating or not, you might be the only one who can save the human race from extinction.”_

_“Thanks,” says Jake dryly.  “No pressure.”_

_“Go home,” Charles tells him.  “Talk to your wife.  She’s the smartest fucking woman on the Ark.  She’ll know what to do.”_

_“If they execute me for this,” says Jake as he stands to go, trying weakly for a morbid joke, “just so you know, you’re welcome to marry her.  Clarke’s always liked you.”_

_“Abby Griffin’s more woman than I can handle,” says Charles frankly, with the ghost of a chuckle.  “No idea how someone that small can be that terrifying.  Best you don’t get floated and save us all the hassle.”_

_“Good idea,” says Jake, but his smile doesn’t reach his eyes, and his hand on Charles’ shoulder as he walks away says everything he can’t put into words._

_He wants to tell Abby – Abby likes Charles, trusts his judgment – but when he walks in the door she greets him with a hot, hungry kiss and pulls him straight to bed.  Clarke’s staying over with Wells, they haven’t had a night alone in so long, and as he tugs his shirt over his head and leans down to take Abby’s breast into his mouth, sliding a hand inside her jeans to find her already soaked and aching, he can’t bring himself to say anything just yet._

_In his gut, he’s sure, but he doesn’t have_ proof. _He’ll tell her when he finds it._

_Not tonight._

_Tonight he just needs to be inside her, to let her wrap him up in her small strong arms where everything is safe and real.  She’s the most alive person he’s ever known, and death feels so distant, so far away when her warm little body is trembling beneath his on that thin hard mattress._

_“You okay, baby?” she whispers, stroking his cheek with her hands, and he doesn’t realize until then how serious he must look, how grim, doesn’t realize he’s fucking her like she’s the only thing left in the world he can hold onto, doesn’t realize his brow is furrowed and his grunts of pleasure sound like pain.  She doesn’t mind that it’s rough, prefers it sometimes, but Jake’s somewhere else and that’s something new._

_“Sorry,” he murmurs.  “Long day.”_

_“Wanna talk about it?”_

_“It’s okay,” he says, kissing her softly, forcibly pressing the dark thoughts away and coming back to her.  “It’s over now.  It’s gonna be okay.”_

_“Let it go,” she advises him, kissing his nose.  “Because if you worry yourself into an early grave, just so you know, I’m marrying David Miller.”_

_“Stepmother to a teenage delinquent,” he says, greatly amused.  “You’d be very good at that.”_

_She laughs and kisses his mouth.  “Okay,” she says, grinning at him.  “Are we good?  Are you back?  From wherever you went to before?”_

_“I’m back.”_

_“Good,” she says, wrapping her thighs around him.  “David’s very nice, but I’d_ much _rather do this with you.”_

_He doesn’t disappear again, into that dark and serious place he went to before, but the curious intensity is still there.  He goes hard, the way she likes it, the way they only ever get to do on the rare nights they don’t have to worry about making noise.  Abby is small, but she’s not made of glass, and she can more than hold her own against Jake’s hard, powerful body.  He groans her name as he comes inside her, over and over, and the sound of his want makes her shiver. It turns her on when he’s a little loud._

_He finishes her off thoroughly, crawling down the covers to lick her clean and make her tremble, fisting his hair, and stays down there until she’s come twice, which he usually saves for when he’s in trouble and trying to get out of it._

_His tongue and lips feel incredible, sweeping hungrily against her clit exactly the way she likes it, and by the time he lets her finish the second time she’s forgotten why she was worried._

_Everything’s going to be all right._

* * * * *

Marcus stirs and wakes, seeing her leaning up on her elbow to look down at him.

“Hi,” he mumbles happily, eyes half-open, and rolls her over onto her back to kiss his way down her neck.

“Good morning,” she says, as she reaches down for his cock, stroking it into hardness.  He makes a shivery little moaning sound and nuzzles into her neck, lips brushing over the chain along her collarbone, kissing it fondly.

 _“I don’t want us to be people who never recover,”_ she hears Jake say as she guides Marcus inside of her, and suddenly those small bits of metal feel white-hot against her skin.  The ring on her hand skims up and down Marcus’ back as she clutches at him, the ring on the chain presses into his skin as he reaches above her to grip the headboard, and for the first time it occurs to her that she and Jake spent eighteen years joking about Thelonious Jaha and Charles Pike and David Miller, but even in fun, they never considered Marcus Kane even once.

Was it because it seemed so impossible that the man he was then would ever let himself fall in love with anyone?  Or was it because deep down there was some part of them that knew it _was_ possible, that this other man was inside him all along, and that knowledge lived so deeply in their bones that it was impossible to laugh about it?  

Either way, he was the only one.

He was the only one they never saw coming.

And yet somehow, she realizes with a shock so forceful it stops her heart for a moment, she’s doing exactly what Jake told her to do.

“I love you,” Marcus whispers into her hair, as if he’s read her mind.  “I love you, Abby.  I love you.”

Jake’s ring is caught between her throat and his chest and his lips are in her hair and he’s never said it out loud before and something inside her shatters.

“I love you,” she says back to him, seizing his face in her hands, kissing him so hard it startles the breath out of his lungs.  “I love you, I love you.”

* * *

  **nine.**

Abby gets a brief reprieve from her usual daily routine of glaring, arms folded, at the king while he sparred with Echo and ripped all his scar tissue back open, because he’s spent the entire day in conference with various ambassadors.  Trishanakru is becoming a problem, Marcus explains, and Roan’s attempting to discreetly feel out which clans might side with them if the rift continues to grow.

She’s a doctor with only one patient, and that patient is too busy to see her.  So instead, she spends the morning doing something much more pleasant.

Jackson has never seen the flamekeeper’s room.  He has never seen the wreckage of Polaris.  He never even learned the real story, he believed in the story of Unity Days all his life.  He walks around the shuttle wreckage with wide eyes, running hesitant fingers over the surface of it, as Abby tells him all the things she’s learned from Clarke.

Marcus smiles when she tells him about it.  Marcus has always liked Jackson, even likes – in an odd backwards way – the very fact that Jackson isn’t quite ready to like _him._   It’s right that Jackson should be this protective of Abby, right that he should watch Marcus with skeptical mistrust.  He knows he’s in this for the long run.  He doesn’t mind Jackson expecting him to prove himself worthy.  Abby is worth all of that, and more.  It’s like an old folk tale, he thinks to himself, lying in bed propped up on his elbow, watching her talk.  Like a plain soldier who falls in love with a queen and has to undertake a series of quests to prove himself worthy.  Spin straw into gold.  Slay a dragon.  Climb a glass mountain and pull down the brightest star in the sky.

“Polaris,” he says suddenly, interrupting her, only just now remembering how that ship got its name.  She looks at him curiously, and he laughs.  “Nothing,” he says.  “I was just thinking about . . . “

_About how you were my compass, even before I loved you.  About all the times I turned my back and chose not to follow you, and then I lost my way.  About the way the Earth changed so many of us into different people, broke us open, dismantled and rebuilt us, but it only made you sharper and more clear.  About how I wasn’t afraid to die that day with Lincoln and Sinclair, because I knew our people would be all right with you to show them the way out of the dark.  About the light that lives inside you that shines into all the dark places and brings hope back after everyone else thinks it’s too late._

“ . . . nothing,” he says, and kisses her.

She lets herself be guided down onto her back as he rolls over on top of her.  “I have to meet Roan in forty minutes,” she cautions him.  “We’ve been in bed for an hour already.  I should get up and get dressed.”

He slips his hand down between her thighs, finds the warmth, caresses it.  She gives a happy little sigh and wriggles her hips upward for more.  “It takes you forty minutes to get dressed?”

“You can’t make me late for the _king._ Apart from anything else, Mister Ambassador, it’s terrible politics.  Not to mention, I always feel like Echo is just waiting for an excuse to stab me.  This could be it.”

“Then your last memories on earth will be very pleasant ones,” he tells her, crooking one finger deep inside her at that angle that makes her bite her lip to keep from screaming, touching that hidden secret spot that makes her whole body feel like it’s melting.

“Goddamn you,” she gasps, as he strokes her open.  “Whatever happened to the Marcus Kane who always followed the rules, no matter what?”

“He died when the Ark crash-landed,” says Marcus, kissing her neck, and he’s a little joking but also a little serious, and she wonders if he’ll ever be done surprising her.  “Why?  Do you miss him?”

She puts her arms around his neck.  “I like the Marcus Kane I’ve got,” she says, tracing fingertips over the planes of his back.  There are a few places she already has memorized and this is one of them, the precise sharpness of his shoulderblades when he lies on top of her, the way they rise up when his muscles flex into perfect triangles like a ship in full sail.  When he lies on top of her, this is where her hands rest, so she’s already learned these few inches of skin the way she knows her own body. This is how it works, loving someone for the rest of your life.  Memorizing them bits at a time.  She’s already planted her flag and claimed this territory, his shoulderblades belong to her now, they’re a part of her own body, the way the hollow between the tendons of her neck where throat meets collarbone – the place he likes most to kiss her – has been claimed by him, his lips and tongue possessing every square inch of it until he could draw it from memory with his eyes closed.  He’s been learning her too, and even though she’s told him she’s in a hurry he refuses to be rushed. 

She comes against his hand with a fluttering little cry, and he smiles down at her with that look on his face that tells her he’s still not sure any of this is real.  “I really do have to get ready,” she says again, but he can’t let go of her, and since she doesn’t really want him to, she barely protests at all.  He’s in a strange mood today, she can’t tell why, something seems to have clicked inside his mind when she was talking about the Polaris wreckage, and it’s as though he’s trying to tell her something with his whole body that he can’t quite say with words.  He kisses his way down her breasts to her belly and just stays there, for a long time, his mouth all over her skin.  Kisses her hips, her navel.  Kisses the scars of her pregnancy and the Mount Weather drill wound in her thigh.  Slides gentle fingers beneath the arch of her back to caress the wounds from the shocklash.  She runs her fingers through his hair.

“Marcus,” she says to him, but she can’t rush this, whatever’s happening, she has to let him say what he’s trying to say.  Whatever it is, it matters to him. 

But the words don’t come.  He just kisses her, touches her, for so long that she begins to feel liquid beneath his hands, melting into warm water at the feel of his tongue sweeping over her skin.  By the time he reemerges to cradle her face in his hands and settle his hips over hers, they’re almost out of time.

“I know,” he says before she can say it out loud.  “But don’t go.”

“Marcus – “

“Don’t go,” he says to her, and buries his face in her shoulder, and her hands slide up to caress the wings of his shoulderblades, and to hell with Roan.  She bends her knees, cradling him in the hollow of her thighs, and then he’s inside her, and time stops moving.

No, she thinks to herself, she wouldn’t trade this Marcus Kane for anything.

When he comes inside her it’s gentle, slow, his breath escaping in one long soft sigh as he kisses her and then collapses onto the pillows on his back, while they both catch their breath, and when she looks over at him he’s smiling.

“You,” she says to him finally, smiling back, “are a _terrible_ influence.”

* * *

  **ten.**

Nyko is arriving after dawn to take her and Jackson back to Arkadia. 

Neither of them wants to say the terrible thing out loud – that they don’t know when they’ll see each other again – but it hovers there between them both.

They don’t sleep much, drifting off lightly for brief moments at a time before waking again.  They make love like they’re stocking it up, like their bodies understand that that the next time could be a forever away.  So they do it over and over, falling asleep in each other’s arms afterwards for an hour or two before one of them wakes and stirs the other to begin again.  They’re gentle, slow, focused.  It’s contemplative, like meditation, the way Marcus moves smoothly inside her and locks his dizzying brown eyes on hers, the way their minds go blank and their bodies take over, inside this little bubble where everything is still and quiet, where there is no Polis or Arkadia, no nuclear meltdown or political strife, just two bodies rising and falling in perfect harmony.

Dawn arrives too soon, causing their hearts to clench in their chests, and as the blackness of night fades into violet and stirs Marcus into wakefulness he knows this is the last time.  He turns to Abby, who is already awake and watching him. “One more for the road?” she murmurs lightly, trying to make a joke, and he tries to smile, but their hearts aren’t in it.  He holds out his arms and she climbs into them, straddling him with her thighs to sink against his pelvis.  His cock takes a little longer to wake than he does, and her fingers glide up and down it, pressing it against her belly and rubbing light circles around the tip.

His hands slide up her waist to palm her breasts, pinching a little at her nipples (something he’s learned she likes) before his fingers glide upward to the now-blank space below her collarbone where Jake Griffin’s ring used to live.  He traces it lightly, drawing a circle where the circle used to be, and she smiles at him.

“He made me promise,” she murmurs.  “That’s why I did it.  I promised Jake.”

Marcus stares blankly.  “Promised him what?”

“That if I would take the rings off if I ever met someone worth taking them off for,” she tells him, and his eyes fill up unexpectedly with tears.

“He didn’t want you to be like his mother, did he?” Marcus murmurs, and his perceptiveness startles her.  “He didn’t want you to stop living, if he died.”  She nods, but can’t speak.  Marcus closes his eyes.  “He was a good man,” he murmurs.  “He was worthy of you.  No other man alive would have been.  I know I’m not.”

“You’re doing just fine."

“We’re going to finish the work he started,” Marcus promises her.  “Jake wanted to find a way to save all of us.  This began with him, and we’re going to finish it.”

She leans down and kisses him, long and sweet and slow.  When she sits back up again, his eyes have that dark, serious look that makes her shiver, the look that says he’s ready, that his desire has overtaken everything else.  She strokes his cock over and over, without breaking eye contact, letting his gaze swallow her up, sinking deep into his eyes as the rest of the world falls away.  Then she leans forward, one hand braced on the mattress and one on him, and guides him inside her.

They know it’s the last time.  They don’t kiss, they don’t speak, they just watch each other, memorizing everything.  The soft little exhale he makes when she guides the head of his cock deep inside her and holds him there.  The way little rivulets of sweat glide down the hollow between her breasts.  She rides him slow and deep, hips rolling against him as her hands clutch at his shoulders, hair a golden tangle brushing over his skin.

The sky goes from purple to rose to orange and it’s over too soon, though they draw it out as long as they can.  But she can’t hold out forever, with the man she loves inside her, and she comes with a soft fluttering cry, collapsing against his chest.  He grips her in strong arms, rolls her over, and cradles her beneath him as he thrusts once, twice, three times, and then he comes too.

 “I’m so in love with you,” he whispers into the hollow of her throat, a little desperately, so frustrated that the words aren’t enough, they’re too _obvious,_ they’re for _everybody,_ there should be a word that’s just for Abby that nobody else is allowed to use because nobody else is worthy of it, but he doesn’t have a word like that, so all he can do is kiss her hair. 

But when she takes his face in her hands and lifts it so she can look at him, her eyes are glowing with some deep inner light, and maybe the words weren’t so inadequate after all because she’s gazing up at him with heart-shattering affection like she knows exactly what he was trying to say.

“I’m so in love with you,” she whispers back, and she doesn’t say “too,” she doesn’t say it like she’s _responding,_ like she’s saying it back, like she’s only using those words because he used them first.  She says it the way she says true things, with that curve of a half-smile at the corner of her perfect mouth and those clear steady eyes, looking at him like he’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.

Sunlight streams in through the white curtains, warming the skin of his back.  He can’t see the stars anymore, though he knows they’re out there still.  Invisible, but not gone.

They have to get up soon.  They’re out of time. 

Abby will be in Arkadia, and he will be here, and this is their last morning for who knows how many mornings, but the North Star doesn’t vanish when the sun rises.  It’s out there, waiting.  North is north is north.  Even when you think you’ve lost it, it always comes back to you, wherever you are.

“I was thinking last night,” she says suddenly.  “About Polaris.”

“The ship?”

“No, the star,” she says.  “I was thinking about being back at Arkadia without you, and how lonely it would feel.  And I remembered that Polaris is the North Star.  The one sailors used to navigate by.”  She kisses his mouth.  “Want to know something interesting about the North Star?” she asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer.  “I learned this from Bellamy.  I didn’t know it.  I always thought the reason explorers followed it was because it shone the brightest in the night sky, but that’s not true.”

He leans up on his elbow, interested.  “It’s not?” he asks.  “I didn’t know that either.”

She shakes her head.  “It wasn’t important because it’s the brightest,” she explains, “it’s because it’s the most steadfast.  All the stars around it are moving, but Polaris is a fixed point.  You always know where it is.”  She kisses his mouth, brushing a loose curl off his forehead.  “A lot of those other stars are all flash and no substance,” she says, with the hint of a smile.  “Can’t rely on them.  Beautiful to look at, but if you try to draw a map by them, you’ll never find your way home.”  She smiles a little as if at a distant memory.  “We were in the Rover, once, with Lincoln and Octavia, and he was telling me about _Julius Caesar._   Bellamy was, I mean.  That’s how Polaris came up.  We were talking about Shakespeare.”  She runs light fingertips over his cheek, stroking the silken-coarse roughness of his beard with the back of her hand.  “’I am as constant as the Northern Star,’” she murmurs, voice low and soft.  “We laughed about it, all four of us.  ‘Sounds like Kane,’ Octavia said.  I thought about it so many times after that.”

He doesn’t know what to say.  He doesn’t know how to tell her that of course he's read _Julius Caesar_ , of course he knows that line, it echoes over and over in his head every time he sees her face.  He doesn’t know how to explain that to him, those words are about _her._

“Our whole world is in chaos,” she murmurs.  “I have too many people relying on me for me to rely on a support that won’t hold.  So if you ever want to know what it was – why I first fell in love with you – it was because for the first time since Jake died I realized I’d found someone who would be there to catch me when I fall, every single time.”  He closes his eyes, unable to speak.  “I don’t care that you’re a little dented and banged up around the edges,” she says lightly, still caressing his face.  “I don’t care that you aren’t perfect.  You don’t have to be perfect for me.  You don’t have to be anything except _here.”_

He closes his eyes as she kisses him, knowing it’s goodbye, knowing when he opens them again she’ll be standing up to get dressed and walk out the door.  The kiss lasts for a long time, and it says everything they need to say.

Abby loves Marcus because he’s her North Star, because even though it took him awhile to get there he’s found his place in the world, he has found his true self, fixed, immovable, because when he wraps his arms around her everything feels steady and true and right again.  But Marcus loves Abby because she’s the sun, because he was lost in the dark without her and suddenly the world is a new place he could never have imagined a year ago, a world full of light and hope.

Her lips lift off his, reluctantly.  He can taste their sadness.  He doesn’t open his eyes.  He can’t watch her walk away, just listens to the heartbreaking sounds of her slow, unhappy movements, picking up her clothes from all over the room and getting dressed again.

“May we meet again,” she murmurs to him from the doorway, and he feels his eyes sting with tears.

“We will,” he whispers back to her.

When he opens his eyes, she’s gone.


End file.
